Chương 64: Chapter 63: A Game You Can't Walk Away From

Cecilia and Luca walked it. North across Corso Regina Margherita, through the ragged eastern skirt of Porta Palazzo where the afternoon trade thinned out to whatever nobody sold by noon, then northeast into streets that quieted by degrees for reasons that had nothing to do with the hour. The market recognized her before she cleared it. She watched it happen down the length of two stalls, the shift in body language that meant the family name was traveling ahead of her through the crowd like wind crossing a field.

A woman selling vegetables she hadn't been able to identify in March straightened off her elbows. Two men stopped a conversation and did not resume it. Somebody's grandmother nodded at her with the flat civility you offer a landlord. None of them thanked her. She priced that as fair. Protection you have to be thanked for is protection somebody is still deciding about.

Aurora in late June smelled of hot stone and frying oil, the plane trees long past blossom and gone to heavy green, the cold off the Alps a memory rather than a presence at this hour. Shutters most of the way down against the heat. A dog flat in what shade a doorway offered, ribs showing. Two women arguing over a crate of onions with the specific energy of people who had been arguing over the same crate for a week.

Luca walked with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders up like he was cold, even though he wasn't. The glasses made him look younger than he was. He hadn't bothered with the tactical jacket she'd given him this morning. She hadn't insisted. His nerves showed, but not the way nerves usually did in people. There was no fidgeting, no nervous chatter, none of the performance most people defaulted to when the edge came on.

His focus just narrowed until everything that wasn't immediately relevant got cut away, leaving him in a quiet space of his own. It reminded her of her father, not in anything he did but in the shape he left behind when he worked, the same stillness that looked like nothing and did the job. Via Cottolengo came up on their left, the southern boundary Ivan had drawn. They turned.

Cecilia walked at the building side, Luca a half step behind and on the curb, so that anyone who didn't already know she carried would have to assume Luca did. Appearances. They made the corner. A group of men leaned against a wall three doors down, sharing something out of a brown bottle. One straightened when he saw them. Cecilia held the man's eyes until they passed. The six blocks turned out to be ordinary in a way that took a moment to become strange. Tabaccherie with their shutters up.

A pharmacy closed since March, the roller door tagged twice and then cleaned, badly, by somebody who cared. Laundry on a third-floor line, three shirts and a dish towel, moving in a wind that followed them across the boundary and didn't stop at it. Two blocks up, the neighborhood tightened around them. No visible System damage, no spawn burns on the facades, no smashed storefronts. Whatever the System dropped here didn't hit hard, and if something bigger came, it hadn't come down these streets.

She made herself look for the details that should have been here and weren't. No boarded ground-floor windows. No salt lines at the doorways, which half of Vanchiglia swore by and which did nothing. No scoring on the stonework at knee height where a Skitterer takes a corner too fast. A child's chalk drawing on the pavement outside a barber's, rained on, still legible. Somebody let a child kneel in the street here long enough to finish it. In Aurora, in the eleventh week, that alone was worth a file.

A church stood on the south edge with its bell housing empty, the bell itself gone to a restorer back in February who presumably still had it, assuming the restorer still had a workshop, or hands, or a reason to finish the job. She looked at the empty frame longer than the job required.

"So," Luca said, when the silence between them reached the point where it was no longer useful, "how exactly are we going to find them if the whole point is that they're not showing themselves?" Cecilia glanced back at him. He hadn't turned to face her, kept his eyes ahead on the street, scanning the rooftops and windows. He'd learned how to walk through contested terrain.

The fact that he'd learned it from watching Bianca, and Bianca had learned it from Ruggiero, and Ruggiero had learned it by making mistakes that left scars, that was the kind of detail nobody would notice unless they cared how people became what they were.

"You let me find them," she said.

"I'm the trigger."

"What, you just—" He waved his hand in the air.

"Show up, and they come out to meet you?"

"I don't have my usual entourage." She tilted her head toward a second-floor window. The shutters there hadn't been touched in days. The dust lay thick on the hinges.

"Someone is paying attention. The minute I walk in alone, I become a conversation they have to decide to have."

"Or an easy target. If it is a trap, it's not like you've brought enough backup to fight your way out. One headshot from a player and it's over." Cecilia didn't disagree. It was a good read, if you stopped at the tactical surface. She stopped walking, which made him stop too.

"I didn't take the Fixer class because I planned to win by killing everyone." She let him hold that for a second, let him think it through the way she knew he would.

"The System wants me to resolve an anomaly. An anomaly isn't a person. It's a problem that shouldn't exist, inside an environment the System controls. Whatever's inside these six blocks, the System doesn't want it here." He took a moment. She watched the adjustment in his eyes.

"So, it's not about who. It's about what."

"If they wanted me to walk in and clear out the residents, they'd have told me to. But they said resolve, not remove. The System gave me a clue in the phrasing."

"You think whoever's here is breaking the System's rules," Luca said.

"And you're being sent in as... what, the moderator?"

"If they're breaking System rules in a way that can be stopped, and the System doesn't stop them, the rules become negotiable. I'm guessing the System would prefer to make an example than renegotiate. And I'm the Fixer it picked for the job." A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. The corner of his mouth tugged in something like amusement, or respect.

"You're making the System work like it's a racket."

"If it's a game you can't quit, and you know the rules are made by somebody with a vested interest, you might as well treat it like a business arrangement." They started walking again. Another half block, the silence falling into a rhythm now, one of hers. The street they were on ended at a four-way, a small grocery on the corner still with its doors open and the sign out: Viviamo con i clienti — no credits. Living with customers, in a city where you didn't take credit. A bold statement, or an old man's pride.

She priced the chances even, didn't go in to find out which. Across the intersection, she stopped. A narrow courtyard, more a passageway between buildings than anything that belonged to sunlight. Stone arch above, faded stenciling of something she couldn't read from the curb. Two trash cans, both empty. The entrance to an apartment stair on the right. And at the end of the courtyard, not twenty meters away, the people she'd come to find. Four of them. She had them sorted before the last one cleared the doorway.

Habit did most of it. The skill sat underneath and settled in like a hand laid on a shoulder, and the sorting arrived complete, the way it always did now, in the order they cost her. The one in front talked before he reached her. Mid-twenties, maybe. Skinny in a way that said the life, not the genes. Jacket with too many zippers. No obvious weapons. A face that tried for charming and came out weak, like a product that had lost its branding somewhere in production.

Nicolò, one of the others said, low, in the tone of somebody who had already lost this argument once today. Behind him came a tall man holding a length of scaffold pipe with both hands like he'd just learned the grip and hadn't forgotten to practice yet. A shorter man beside him, blinking too much, sleeves pushed up over arms that hadn't seen enough sun for the season. Last, a girl who hadn't moved past the doorway. Early twenties or so, a black beanie pulled down to her eyebrows.

The girl hadn't looked at Cecilia yet, because she was watching something past Cecilia's left shoulder, up the street. Cecilia turned her head a fraction and followed the look. A fifth. A girl in a grey sweatshirt walking slowly down the far side of the street, just beyond the intersection. Carrying something flat under her arm, like a book or a box. No weapons, but something about the way she moved said she didn't need one. Not immediately. Maybe not at all. Five, then.

A quick Appraisal check marked them as Players.

"Well, this is awkward," said the one called Nicolò, when they'd all finished looking at each other and hadn't said anything. Luca shifted behind her. Cecilia put out her left hand, flat, at hip height, palm down, without looking. Stay. She felt him stop.

"You're the one running this show?" Nicolò tried the charming tone again, and it missed worse this time. He glanced over her head at Luca, as if realizing a second time that there were two of them, not one. She kept her voice even, no heat, nothing personal in it.

"This is your operation?"

"I didn't say that." He stopped himself, started over, trying to find the tone he wanted.

"Look, you can see we're busy, and we'd all love to have a friendly chat, but maybe now isn't the time, so how about you take a walk and come back tomorrow with an appointment?" She raised her eyebrows. Behind him, the one with the pipe lowered it slowly and planted his feet a little wider. The small one glanced back into the building they'd come out of, like help might still arrive. The girl in the beanie finally looked at Cecilia, then at the girl on the street. Nobody left. Nobody went back inside.

The one on the street had stopped, a dozen paces from the corner, her back turned like she'd paused to admire the day. The box or book was tucked against her side. Cecilia priced her as the biggest danger in the equation.

"I have one question," Cecilia said.

"I'd like an answer, and then we'll all go back to whatever we were doing. No appointment needed." The pipe man tensed, but Nicolò made a gesture with one hand, half of a wave, like this could still be smoothed over if everybody stayed polite.

"You can ask. Can't guarantee you'll like the answer." Not an outright no. A negotiating opening. She almost appreciated the instinct, though she wouldn't have used it. A better play would have been a simple refusal and a promise to think it over. It would have bought them the evening. Now to choose the best question to break the ice with. She had banked on her initial read that this crew was a bunch of opportunistic players trying to stay hidden and survive quietly.

That assumption held so far, which narrowed her choices. And one of those choices, given the nature of the anomaly Ivan found, leapt ahead of the rest.

"Would you be willing to form a business partnership with me?" That stopped him cold. He blinked, the expression sliding from trying to manage the situation to genuine confusion. The pipe man looked like he'd expected a different question, one he could swing at. Even the beanie girl was looking at her now, the faintest tilt to her head.

"I... what?" Nicolò managed.

"A partnership. We've both found a piece of ground that does something useful. Mine's bigger. I can expand what you've built. You can tell me how it works. You don't need to be small, and I don't need to figure out your trick on my own." He stared at her. His mouth opened and closed once.

"That's—you can't—you're a gang. You run protection rackets. What the hell are you talking about?" She kept her face blank. Let the opening stand.

"We don't do business with criminals," the girl in the sweatshirt said from behind them, her voice clear across the street. Her back still turned.

"Go home, lady." That clarified a few things, and the timing said something more. Whoever she was, she'd been watching the exchange closely enough to know exactly when to step in. If Cecilia took this crew seriously at all, that girl moved from potential threat to key piece in one sentence. Still, it hurt to hear all these accusations of criminality with nothing behind them but old ideas. Slander. Outright prejudice.

Eight years of hard work trying—and succeeding—to shift her family from the criminal economy, and what she got in return from a group of gamers she could maybe make allies out of, was nothing but an ignorant dismissal. If they only knew how hard it'd been to change things. But, of course, they wouldn't bother to find out, would they? The very fact she and her family operated on the edges made her a villain, to outsiders like them.

She drew a heavy sigh, looked up, closed her eyes, and pinched the bridge of her nose. Her cheeks burned slightly. This was her father's reaction, her uncle's reaction. Not hers. But for the briefest of moments she let the act have her. Then, she let the act fade, her hands falling away. She counted two full breaths in her head. When she opened her eyes again, she made her voice carry.

"This conversation isn't about criminal enterprises. I'm not going to stand here and justify myself to people who don't know what we do. I came to make an offer that would be better for all of us, and that's still on the table, even if I don't like your tone." The silence in the courtyard said she'd pushed harder than she needed to, but the feeling of it helped. She let the annoyance sit in her voice.

"Now. Who wants to start talking actual business, and who's going to make this harder than it has to be?" The one called Nicolò looked at her, then at the sweatshirt girl on the street, then back again, clearly deciding that business might be less dangerous than whatever this had become.

"What kind of deal?" he asked. Cecilia crossed her arms.

"I don't want a war. If you don't either, we can find terms. But we're doing it now. I don't make a habit of asking twice." She'd never said that last part to anybody, not in any context, because it was usually understood before the question came up. But this time, it felt like it needed saying.